The gender-equality Olympics: medals and penalties so far

The 2012 London
Olympics have been heralded as the best Olympics yet for women, although
gender-inequalities remain, from sexist media commentary and gender-based
bullying to less sponsorship and media coverage for female athletes than male
athletes. Here, a gender score-card of the winners and losers so far.

Share this

Read more!

Get our weekly email

Enter your email address

The 2012 London Olympics have been heralded as the best
Olympics yet for women, the first time the games have had female athletes
representing all the participating
countries. As remarkable
female athletes continue to set new world records, these games are a golden
period for celebrating the successes of female athletes worldwide, many of whom
have had to overcome significant challenges to take their place at the
Olympics.

Still, predictably enough, though this is a period of appreciating
the successes of sportswomen and pushing for further progress, still we find
that sexism is continuing to hang around like an uninvited guest at the
Olympics party. And, indeed, there
have already been several noteworthy contenders for the Most Misogynistic Medal
this year. First up is the debacle
of the press coverage of women’s beach volleyball, heralded as the Olympics’
“sexiest sport” by breathless media outlets, which provided ample
opportunity for female athletics to be treated as
made-for-men pornography, with the mayor of London likening the “semi-naked”
female competitors to “wet
otters”, and a media
treatment leading to the parody: “what
if all sports were photographed like women’s beach volleyball?”

Yet the exhibiting of female athletes primarily
as passive fodder for the ‘male gaze’ continues through the Olympics like a
retro parade (in Britain, after all, these are the times for retro
parades, distracting
the masses with stock pageantry, and arcane gender roles fit
so neatly into the Jubilee-bunting adornments of the 2012 British summer). The sexist commentary runs the gamut
from Australian newspapers bullying a female swimmer for
‘gaining weight’ to sports commentators asking female Olympics gymnastics
teams if they had “seen
any diva moments yet”, the word ‘diva’ having obvious gendered connotations
of hysterical women throwing tantrums, rather than professional, competitive
athletes. Apart from gender stereotyping, another
ongoing concern is whether they receive coverage at all: the Fair
Game campaign to end sexism in sport notes that currently 5% of sports
media coverage in the UK features women.

How sports commentators describe male and female successes
is also key: in a report that brought back memories of the event
last year in which Sky sports commentators Andy
Gray and Richard Keys were caught on air making sexist remarks about
lineswoman Sian Massey, a recent
study of past Olympics coverage by American network NBC found that sports
commentators spoke differently of sportspersons depending on their gender –
namely that when female athletes succeed, commentators tend to focus
on ‘luck’ more than when male athletes win, yet when female athletes fail
it is more about their ability and commitment than when male athletes fail,
when the male competitors’ success is more noted.

As always, the most disheartening examples are the undermining
of women by other women, that most clever trick of patriarchy that comedian and
‘Mean Girls’ writer Tina Fey once called “girl
on girl crime”: a case in point from last week was the overwhelming
response on Twitter, mainly by women, to American gymnast Gabby Douglas, who
became an Olympic gold medallist this year at 16 years old – the overwhelming
response, that is, to how Gabby should wear
her hair. The racial politics
of hairstyles (that ‘straight’ Caucasian hair is still seen as professional and
‘neat’ whereas African-American hair is seen as ‘wild’ and ‘unkempt’)
intersected grimly with women policing other women’s appearance and
‘attractiveness’ – hardly an activity that deserves an award – leading to Serena
Williams to come to Douglas’s defence. Bullying a sixteen year old girl who has won an Olympic gold
medal seems ridiculous, when you think how cruel and unnecessary it is to bully
any sixteen year old girl. Yet female athletes being harassed by online
trolling continues to be a serious problem that sportswomen perpetually – and should
not have to – deal with: 23 year old Olympic swimming competitor Rebecca
Adlington, for instance, recently
spoke out about the abuse she received about her appearance on Twitter. Adlington, unlike those who abuse her
about her appearance online, now holds the title of Olympic
bronze champion.

In fact, one of the clear developments of these ‘most gender
equal yet’ Olympics – a sign of progress, even if it is a response to continued misogyny – is that female athletes have increasingly
been speaking out about sexism, and putting their detractors firmly in their
place. After winning a silver
medal, cyclist Lizzie Armitstead used the media platform she was given to speak
out about the “overwhelming
sexism” that she has experienced throughout her career and still persists
in sport, opening a discussion on how the media still “uses sex” to sell
female sport to male spectators.

18 year old Olympic weightlifter Zoe Smith also spoke out to
slam down the sexist trolls (who presumably aren’t winning gold medals in anything) who responded to a BBC
documentary on Zoe and her teammates by commenting online about how they didn’t
find her attractive: “This may be shocking to you, but we actually
would rather be attractive to people who aren’t closed-minded and ignorant. …We,
as any women with an ounce of self-confidence would, prefer our men to be
confident enough in themselves to not feel emasculated by the fact that we
aren’t weak and feeble” she wrote.

With female athletes having to spend so much time dealing
with this kind of abuse, it’s impressive they still manage to perform at the
top of their game. Yet female athletes also face the disadvantage of less sponsorship than
their male counterparts: a recent report commissioned
by the Women’s Sport
and Fitness Foundation found that only 0.5% of all commercial sports
sponsorship goes to women’s sports while 61% goes to male sports (and the rest
to sports in which both genders compete), an inequity Lizzie Armitstead has described as presenting a significant burden for female athletes.

So, a brief tally so far: unequal sponsorship, unequal media
coverage, emphasising female athletes’ appearance over performance, speaking
about their successes as ‘luck’, and calling young female Olympians “ugly” and
“whales” – yep, there are a lot of Misogyny Medals to go round. And some sterling runners-up too: Japanese
and Australian female soccer teams flying economy while their male
counterparts fly first-class, the ‘Thanks Mom’
Olympics advert by Proctor and Gamble reinforcing regressive gender roles
of women primarily of value as home-makers, hints
of sexism (and racism) in the Ye Shiwen doping allegations, ESPN’s ‘Body
Issue’ featuring US Olympians with the male athletes in active and ‘action’
poses and female athletes primarily in passive,
‘male gaze’ poses.

But at least there has been one new achievement: the amount
of discussion about the need to increase support for female athletes, in terms
of both coverage and sponsorship, and the significance of so many female
athletes at the top of their game speaking out about – and saying they’re fed
up with – the sexism they experience.
Seeing women’s football on television as part of the Olympics may, for
instance, finally
increase its status after the Olympics end, while the successes of athletes
such as Adlington and Armitstead will hopefully encourage more young women to
participate in these sports. As
female Olympians continue to win medals and break records, now is the time to
also beat the broken-record of sexism in sport.